Rancher Cliven Bundy speaks at a news conference near Bunkerville, Nev., Thursday. Bundy, a Nevada rancher who became a conservative folk hero for standing up to the government in a fight over grazing rights, lost some of his staunch defenders Thursday after wondering aloud whether blacks might have had it better under slavery.

Rancher Cliven Bundy, second from left, hugs a supporter before holding a news conference near Bunkerville, Nev. Bundy, a Nevada rancher who became a conservative folk hero for standing up to the government in a fight over grazing rights, lost some of his staunch defenders Thursday after wondering aloud whether blacks might have had it better under slavery.

The Bundy family and their supporters fly the American flag as their cattle are released by the Bureau of Land Management back onto public land outside of Bunkerville, Nev. The federal Bureau of Land Management says six cattle died in the roundup of animals it says rancher Cliven Bundy allowed to graze illegally on public land outside his southern Nevada property. A Texas land dispute has outgoing Gov. Rick Perry and the Republican candidate favored to replace him, Greg Abbott, decrying the same federal agency currently embroiled in an armed standoff in Nevada.

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The Cliven Bundy spectacle in Nevada has provided a Wild West backdrop for our hottest political issues as we gallop toward the midterm elections.

Politically, the conflict between the Bureau of Land Management and the Bundy family has highlighted the importance of picking one’s battles wisely. Suffice to say, a smattering of pundits and politicians drank from the wrong chalice.

One day, Bundy was the new face for conservative opposition to federal expansionism, a human metaphor for the last man armed and standing for freedom against the superior forces of federal agents.

Then Bundy wandered off-script and spoke his fevered mind. Bundy wondered whether African-Americans weren’t better off as slaves picking cotton than living on the plantation of government subsidy.

“Negroes,” Bundy further observed, abort their babies and put their men in prisons. Young black males were in trouble, he said, because they hadn’t been taught to pick cotton.

Pundits and politicians, including most notably Sean Hannity, Sen. Rand Paul and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, quickly distanced themselves from the Bundy comments, though not, curiously, from his objections to the government’s authority over grazing lands.

Of course they would disavow racist remarks. But they never should have aligned themselves with someone who not only flouts the law but also has armed himself against government agents, indicating his willingness to protest through violence.

For years, Bundy has been enjoying the benefits of public property for grazing privileges without paying fees or taxes, as required by federal law and as reinforced by various court rulings. He did pay local and state taxes, but refuses to recognize federal authority.

That Bundy has been acting illegally is not in dispute. The recent, made-for-media confrontation was in fact the finale in a years-long string of court battles, none of them resolved in Bundy’s favor. Simply, Bundy doesn’t recognize the U.S. government, period.

Initially, the standoff might have had a certain romantic appeal to sentimentalists weaned on cowboy flicks. The rogue rancher, his gun slung low, stands up to guvmint agents, defending his right to roam free and die young. Alarm and drama were magnified when agents confiscated and killed some of Bundy’s cattle. Now that’s a line too far.

Unfortunately for Bundy’s defenders, Bundy wasn’t Ben Cartwright and his boys defending the Ponderosa. He was the nameless half-wit who staggers out of the saloon, shooting up stars to stop the railroaders after the train has left the station.

What were these conservative defenders thinking?

With the possible exception of Paul, they were thinking about their ratings and political base. Paul is an unapologetic libertarian and, therefore, easily sympathetic to those who contest aggressive federal rule. Perry was winking at secessionists before he began renovating his image with spectacles and a professorial air.

The left does not entirely escape critique in this imbroglio. No sooner did Bundy launch his racist screed than leftward-leaning media began extrapolating Bundy’s racism to signify racism throughout the GOP. One man’s rant is not an institutional creed.

Thus, this liberal conflation is a sample of flawed logic. That said, it is not baseless. The GOP is not a party of racists, but it is a party with racists.

Are all Republicans racist? Of course not.

But Republicans should repent of associating with anyone espousing or endorsing such incendiary nastiness. And championing lawlessness does nothing to elevate discourse, civility or any of the other higher roads to which we might more enthusiastically aspire.

The GOP does not deserve to be indicted along with Bundy, but for too long the party has sown the wind by tolerating some of its less ennobled colleagues. Cliven Bundy is their whirlwind.

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Until such time as Nevada secedes from the union, Bundy needs to get off the Federal Gov. land and pay his fines for running cattle on American land....I don't appreciate my tax dollars being stolen by a hateful, ignorant, ungrateful, redneck so he can feed his cattle at our expense....seems to me he owes the US Govt. a share of the profits he made from feeding his cattle at Americans' expense since 1998. On the bright side, maybe someone will offer him a parttime position picking cotton to pay off his debts/fines. Afterall he seems genuinely convinced it is a character building employment opportunity, and he certainly needs a character re-adjustment.

Bundy subscribes to the belief of the "sovereign individual." The "sovereign individual" is the cornerstone of the philosophy of the Posse Comitatus, the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) and other far right fringe groups. Governor Brownback praised the "sovereign individual" in a throw away line in his State of the State speech. If one listens closely to what Brownback says, he espouses the Bundy philosophy.

American Heritage Dictionary definition of fascism: "...a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

But why did he and other Foxaganda hosts first cleave to Bundy? One reason is that there is a contingent of radical anti-government "freedom-fighters" under the GOP tent. Just like the Evangelical faction, the anti-tax fanatics have to be pandered. Bundy hates his government and his protest was to not pay grazing fees. He's not far-right; he's over-the-cliff right.

A friend of mine once fell into a group of this kind of anti-tax/anti-government right-wingers and stopped paying his taxes, to the tune of something like 50 grand. The IRS caught up with him and wound up only making him pay a portion of the owed money. The big bad state was very lenient with him as a small businessman. And he paid back what they asked.

The function of conservatism is not to nullify the state. In theory, the state belongs to all of us. It actually, in reality, only partly belongs to us. We live in an oligarchy and are losing our vested powers daily. That's what Bundy should be protesting, but he and his buds probably sit around talking conspiracy and are embarrassed that we have a black president. When he's out in the barn, the AM radio is probably blaring.

The show of arms against the government is ridiculous. The federal agents were wise not to exacerbate the situation just to collect the grazing fees. The Bundyists are, after all, just ordinary people. We don't want another Waco.

Somewhere down the line, Bundy will have to make reparations, because his protest put the bill on his neighbors' account. We are paying for him to graze. He is the welfare case. He is the law-breaker. But whatever he has stolen, it is a pittance to what Wall Street and monopolies steal from us every day. And not one of the banker-gangsters ever saw the inside of a jail. Some of their underlings run our Treasury.

The government is not our enemy if we control it. But if we sell it to the highest bidders, they become our new owners and we will have no say in our fate. They will put people in power to benefit them, not us. Hating the state is hating yourself and your neighbors.

There are a lot of things going on in Washington D.C. that make ignorant remarks insignificant.
I don't think there would much of a to do if Sterling was black and complained about his trophy being with a white person. The old rancher in his ignorant thinking might be saying that people are better off when they work. Government plantation never bettered anyone in the long run.

And I don't think we know the entire story yet. The Federal Government is not going to go in with such force over a couple hundred head of cattle eating sage brush.

I recently stated I am sick and tired of all this "PC" garbage. People say things with good intentions and it gets blown out of proportion and twisted.

On another note, look at the Clippers owner - a private conversation meant to be private but taped and made public and he's ousted for life and fined $2.5m for having that private conversation. I bet there's not a politician or public figure that would get a clean pass if we were to know all their private conversations.

It's time to stop all this nonsense and stop looking for anything big or little to bring our neighbors down. What ever happened to 'turn the other cheek'?

Sometimes people make mistakes, hey, this is earth, not heaven. Bundy, when he opened his mouth about blacks, showed his true colors. Most right wing commentaries pulled away, and fast. But let it be said that Mr. Bundy comes from a different generation and class warfare is rampant in the days of his youth. Mr. Bundy also used the wrong terms in describing his philosophy of life, saying the black did better picking cotton is a fair comparison from being tied to the federal government for their assistance, the modern slave master you might say. I think had Mr. Bundy had the educational level of a lawyer, he may have said what he said with more acuity than how he said it on the range. It can be said today that most breadwinners are consistently PO'd that they are working and paying taxes so that free-loaders can live off of government's largesse'. That is what Mr. Bundy should of said and would of been correct to say it.

I have to remind myself often of the concept of "context." Mr. Bundy, a barely literate cowboy versus the billionare Sterling who obviously has the ability to speak in congent words indicating what he thinks. Unfortunately, they both said the same thing: by showing how ignorant they both are. So in context, Mr. Bundy didn't have the ability to say what he really wanted to say, and Mr. Sterling telling his girlfriend, who was surrepticiously recording the telephone conversation, that he did not appreciate her flouting her black boy friends at his games. In context, he had the right to ask her not to do what she was doing even though she had all the rights in the world to do what she did.

All of this false bravado from both sides only point out that racisim is still a problem in the USA. Race baters Sharpton and Jackson and now the President and US AG live for these moments to point out to the world that racism is still a problem even after the take over by all of those uppity blacks of the Federal Government. What does that tell us? That there is much more to do, more rules to write; more hate regulations to place in the federal register and more people who will promilgate racism because it pays good money.

I found it totally believable that when the NAACP decided to pull its award for Mr. Sterling that they failed to return his $45,000 he gave them which would really show how "upset" they are. And in the same vein, if the Clippers players were so upset, they should also return their paychecks, after all, its all dirty money, isn't it?

There is a much larger reason for this whole episode than mere stupidity. But nobody seems to comment on this and apparently, in their glee over how this idiot blew himself up, do not know it.. The Koch Brothers purchased, fanned the flames of, and promoted this entire episode for a much larger economic reason. This is what Hannity would not admit. His bosses at Fox were paid by Koch organizations to promote this. They want to be able to privatize public lands, so that they can drill and frack on it.

William Rivers PItt explains:

"The Koch Brothers, if truth be told, could not give less of a damn about Cliven Bundy and his band of merry men, but until Bundy blew out like an old, racist tire, they were intensely interested in using him as the avatar for a fight they've been waging for twenty years: placing control of publicly-owned federal lands back into the hands of the states, so the states can lease or sell those lands to companies like Koch Industries for cattle grazing, mining, drilling, fracking, and lumbering.

Right now, those lands are protected from such activities, but the Koch Brothers were hoping to ride Cliven Bundy's cause to a massive land grab. The fact that Cliven Bundy upended the intentions of the Koch Brothers by being a racist idiot on television does not change their intentions one whit. They want to drill, to mine, to frack, and to profit off those lands that belong to us, for now".

"For now" is the key phrase. THAT is what this is about.

More from Pitt:

"So, as matters currently stand, Cliven Bundy can certainly be quantified as a human clown car. Do not, however, lose sight of the real story here: Mr. Bundy was also a Trojan Horse filled with Koch Industries drilling equipment until he blew it. Bundy may be gone from the news soon, but the Koch Brothers still want that land, because the world is not enough for guys like that, which is why, to no small degree, the rest of us can't have nice things like clean air and water that doesn't catch on fire coming out of the tap."